Reply to Sana et al.’s (2022) Commentary on Rest-from-Deliberate-Learning as a Mechanism for the Spacing Effect

Abstract

Sana and colleagues (2022) have raised a number of challenges regarding the operationalisation of constructs and selection of articles to Chen et al.’s (Educational Psychology Review 33:1499–1522, 2021) suggestion that resting from cognitive activity could possibly allow for working memory recovery and so explain some of the data on the spacing effect. In our response, we indicate that the goal of our proposed framework was to try to resolve some mixed results of the spacing and interleaving effects and offer an alternative explanation for those mixed results, rather than proposing a theory of everything. We acknowledge that there are other important factors, which does not however, provide grounds for rejecting our hypothesis. Additional empirical studies are needed to determine whether rest and its effect on working memory are important when analysing the spacing effect.

The Relationship between Interleaving and Variability Effects: A Cognitive Load Theory Perspective

“…For half of the groups, the topics were interleaved and therefore spaced (i.e., the MLML and LMLM groups). If spacing had been relevant in this context, these groups should have obtained higher learning outcomes on the post-test and less working memory resources depleted on the working memory test than the two blocked groups (i.e., the MMLL and LLMM groups), based on the framework of Chen and colleagues [29,34]. However, neither of these tests revealed evidence indicating the superiority of the interleaved design.…”